New Foods: Marich's Pumpkin Spice Caramels

A few years ago, I discovered some fantastic candies at the Andronico's supermarket in the Sunset.  They were chocolate covered peanut butter caramels, and they were awesome.  How could they not be? To me, peanut butter + dessert = delicious*.  And on top of that, these little beauties had chocolate and caramel, too.  Are you kidding me?  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  Peanut butter, chocolate, and caramel?  You've got a sale there, mister!  Unfortunately, Andronico's pulled the product (they were presumably exacting revenge against me for referring to the store as overpriced).  Every now and then I pick up similar looking products when I come across them.  I'm just trying to recapture the joyful taste sensation that Andronico's introduced to me and then cruelly took away.  They never measure up.  This post is about the most recent poseur caramel.

A couple of weeks ago, Duc and I were invited to dinner at a friend's.  We brought a homemade apple crisp made with apples from our tree.  Apple crisps must be accompanied by vanilla ice cream (California state law.  Proposition 75.  Look it up), so we stopped by Canyon Market in Glen Park.  Now, you can't buy just one thing at a grocery store.  Everybody knows that.  Fortunately, Canyon Market was selling a curious little product, Marich's Pumpkin Spice Caramels, and I was instantly reminded of those Andronico's chocolate peanut butter caramels.  I had to try them.

They weren't cheap.  $5.89 for an 8 oz. package.  According to our scale, one caramel (the last one, as it turns out) weighed 0.125 oz.  So the package had about 64 caramels, so each one cost 9 cents.  But did I get $0.09 of pleasure out of each caramel?  Well, let's put it this way, I have no intention of buying them again.  They're not terrible, though.  They're sweet, and they definitely have some of the flavors you associate with pumpkin pie.  I think Duc put it best.  They're just a little too much.

I think you can get to the crux of the problem by looking at the list of ingredients.  First ingredient: white chocolate (right now, as my mom reads this she's wincing and saying something nasty about how white chocolate isn't chocolate).  I have no real problem with white chocolate, but it doesn't really contribute any flavor to food.  It's really just sweetened fat.  The second problem with the list: there's no mention of pumpkin at all.  I'm not sure how well pumpkin would hold up in confections and candy, but this still feels like a case of false advertising to me.

So I guess I'll just have to keep looking for that elusive candy to replace the Andronico's chocolate peanut butter caramels.  Or those petty bastards at Andronico's could just bring them back.

* Thursday night I had dinner at a Brazilian Churrascaria.  They had a dessert called a "Peanut Butter Thing" (I have to assume it's a traditional Brazilian treat).  There was no way I was going to pass on that.

Fun with pomegranates...

My favorite fun fact about pomegranates: on the pomegranate wikipedia page, readers are warned not to confuse pomegranate with permanganate.  This is excellent advice.  At first, it seems like a pretty difficult mistake to make, what with pomegranate being a fruit and permanganate being a powerful oxidant.  Still, the colors are pretty similar, at least when the permanganate is in solution.  I've never tasted permanganate -- I expect it's a little tangy -- and I don't recommend it.

Here are some more fun facts:

1.) The little seeds in a pomegranate are called arils.

2.) Duckie and I did a little experiment a couple weeks ago.  We dismembered a medium-sized pomegranate (don't worry, we killed it humanely) and counted the arils.  Okay, I'll come clean.  We didn't actually count the arils.  We approximated using a technique I learned in elementary school.  We counted how many arils fit in a tablespoon (38) and how many tablespoons worth of arils were in one pomegranate (21).  Using the miracle of mathology we can use these numbers to determine how many arils are in a pomegranate.  It's too complicated for me to get into here, but the answer is about 798.

3.) Persephone ate 6 pomegranate arils while being held captive in the underworld by Hades.  As a result, she was forced to spend six months a year in hell.  This was the Greeks explanation for the changing seasons.  I'm pretty sure this is just a myth.  I'll look it up at work tomorrow, and see what scientific evidence there is to back this up.

4.) Jason Giambi Colorado Rockies t-shirts make perfectly reasonable pomegranate peeling shirts (note the little purple stains).

Getting the most out of your placebo

I was reading a blog post on Science-Based Medicine (SBM) about pain management the other day, and the post included a very brief discussion of proglumide as a placebo enhancer.  I haven't read the studies, but the summaries and abstracts I've seen tell an interesting story.  When patients suffering from ischemic pain were treated with either a sugar pill or proglumide, but were told that they were being given a powerful pain killer, both groups showed a reduction in their pain.  The effect was more pronounced for the proglumide group.  Another group was treated with proglumide, but they weren't told that the drug would have any impact on their pain (again, I didn't read the studies, so I'm not sure how this part of the study worked.  Patient: "Doc, I'm in pain." Doctor: "Here take this pill."  Patient: "Will this make me feel better?" Doctor: "How should I know?").  In this third group, the patients showed no improvement.  So what does this all suggest?  The sugar pill cohort improvement was definitely due to the placebo effect.  However, since proglumide showed no benefit when the patients didn't expect it to help, the benefit in the first proglumide group was probably also due to the placebo effect.  But the placebo effect was more significant for the proglumide group.  This suggests that proglumide actually enhances the placebo effect.

Why do I find this so interesting?  I think the general population dismisses the placebo effect as sort of fake.  "Just in your head" type stuff.  But it's important to remember that things that take place in our minds require real biochemical processes.  So, yeah, you have to believe proglumide is going to help you in order to get any benefit from it, but the benefit is a product of understood biochemical interactions (in this case, cholecystokinin antagonism).  It's scientifically acceptable faith healing.

New Foods: Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Goodies

This is my first post in what I expect will be an extensive series.  You see, unlike most people, I really like food.  I mean I really like food.  I know that's difficult to understand, but bear with me. It'll be worth your while.

When it comes to my highly honed liking of food, one of my favorite things is to try new food -- preferably unhealthy and highly processed.  When I see an unfamiliar candy bar in a vending machine, I'm really tempted to dish out 85 cents to cram the thing into my gaping maw.  I realize this yearning is difficult to understand, but I just can't control myself.  You're probably asking yourself, "Why would anyone want to try new foods?  Why can't we all just be happy eating thin flavorless nutritious gruel everyday?"  The answer is:  I don't know!  It just one of life's little mysteries.  Let's leave it at that.

Today I will be discussing Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Goodies.  My lovely and wonderfully indulgent wife bought these tasty little cookies for me on Monday.  Why would she do that?  I just said she's wonderful and indulgent.  Duh.  Try to keep up.  Here's a picture of the box:

As you can see from the box, this is a chocolate covered sugar cookie with a delicious little dollop of peanut butter to give that extra je ne sais quoi (That means "I don't know what", BTW.  Fundamentally, it's not a helpful descriptive term, but I like it so there it is).  It's a lot like the classic Girl Scout cookie called a Tagalong.  The Peanut Butter Goodies are a little crunchier with a higher chocolate to peanut butter ratio than their Girl Scout-peddled doppelgangers.  Plus the Goodies have an extra little sprinkle of peanut pieces for texture.  I could live without it, but it doesn't cause any real harm.  Head's up, I can't tell you which I like better because I don't presently have any Tagalongs to perform that particular taste test right now.  If you'd like to send me some, I'll do the comparison and update my blog appropriately.

I know what you're asking yourself now, "But are the Peanut Butter Goodies healthy?"  Well take a look at the ingredients and nutritional information and judge for yourself.

I don't know what any of that stuff means, but look at all those ingredients!  You know what I always say:  More ingredients equals more better food.  Hoo-Ray!  (I always add the Hoo-Ray to distract from the bad grammar).

In conclusion, Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Goodies are basically crunchy Tagalongs.  If you don't think that's a good thing, you're probably not going to like my food reviews in general.  For me peanut butter + chocolate + cookie = awesome.  Enjoy!

Jeff Passan's Free-Agent Tracker from Yahoo! Sports

Aaaand I'm breaking my rules with my first real post.  Sorry, I'll do better next time.

Anyway, Jeff Passan just posted his yearly MLB free-agent tracker.  It's a great online tool for following off-season baseball developments.  I'm not sure why I like it so much.  Like everybody else, I supposed I can be drawn in by the allure of the possibilities for the future.  What fabulous free-swinging power bat is out there looking to push the A's from mediocrity to the post-season?  Tee-heehee....I can hardly wait!  Yes, I know it isn't going to happen.  Shut up.  Why do you have to be such jerk all the time?  Now I'm sad.

Day 1 -- Why?

I'm not sure what I'm going to post on this blog.  I guess we'll see.  It does strike me that the point of having a blog is to introduce new content to the internet.  I mean, why should I just use this blog to refer other people to things they can find themselves on some other blog or new site?  That's just a waste of everybody's time.  Though, I suspect I will indulge in that kind of behavior from time-to-time.  I'm weak that way.  I am going to try to pull stuff I find interesting from the real world into this site.  I think that'll be good for me.  I hope you enjoy my posts.